U Maniacs! U Blew It Up!

I’ve been thinking a lot about Planet of the Apes recently. Specifically, how it is that in this fictional account, humans lost their ability to speak and apes acquired advanced language skills. It seemed so far-fetched…in the days before texting, email, and social media.

Nowadays when you look around, most people are communicating via smart phone, iPad, laptop; people simply don’t talk to each other anymore. When I was at the airport recently an entire family sat together, each person fully focused on his or her phone, and said nary a word for over an hour. Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate a quiet family, and I especially appreciate quiet children. But it got me thinking about how we might be outsmarting ourselves with technology.

And although we still write, we no longer write in complete sentences, or even words. YKWIM? U R c’ing it 2. YOLO. HMU. LOL. ROFLMAO. If we always use 2 for two, to and too, how long will it take us to forget the difference?

What if we all get so caught up in our social media we forget how to be, well, social? In person? Via spoken language?

Is it possible that the other primates are just standing by, biding their time, until we all social media ourselves into oblivion?

12 Responses to U Maniacs! U Blew It Up!

You may be onto something with texting, but technology use extends beyond humankind. A dolphin named Merlin uses an iPad to communicate with people, and two orangutans in Miami use iPads to communicate with each other. There’s got to be a conspiracy in here somewhere…I’ll check my iPad and see what I can learn.

Well as usual, it’s not enough for us to ruin our own species and our own planet. We have to take the rest of the animal kingdom down with us. As Kurt Vonnegut speculated, these big, cumbersome brains we lug around will ultimately be our doom. It’s a big Apple conspiracy, and entirely possible that Steve Jobs came back as a dolphin.

Here’s one thing I really didn’t want to be right about. Sigh. Memorizing multiplication tables took up a good chunk of my childhood and are firmly ingrained in my head for the rest of my life. These kids 2day.

It’s already too late. Our only hope is that the primates don’t learn the secret text code. My daughter (who’s about to enter an engineering program) was given a simple math test for a summer job at a market. She got 8 x 7 wrong….we’re doomed!